Re Orienting Orientalism

Re-Orienting Re-Orienting Orientalism Wael B. Hallaq Columbia University

I The study of any culture, as of any phenomenon, must ineluctably be framed by the value-system and cultural imperatives of the scholar, irrespective of any claim to objectivity. This is what it means not to have –or the impossibility of having-- a neutral point of view from which to study anything in the world. When Muslim scholars “studied” their Shar ! ‘a ‘a1 system, or any aspect thereof, they took it as a given that they were teaching and writing as expositors of the values in which the system itself was grounded and enshrined. The entire range of the discursive formations they have structured – be they theological, philosophical, linguistic, logical or “legal” 2 – responded not only to the moral  grundnorm  (a foundational act  strictu  sensu) but continued to react and adjust itself to the evolving challenges that the system and its practitioners continued to pose. Thus the jurists wrote for their fellow Muslims about the norms and principles of their own society, whether for theoretical or practical ends. They assumed or took for granted a considerable amount of knowledge about the system (precisely that which we as historians take most pains in the twenty-first century to unravel), but they also had much to say that was not taken for granted. Within the internal logic of the system in which they found themselves, and within the constraints and conditions that made their system possible in the first place, they rationally responded to the arising stimuli as any community of scholars and “legal” practitioners would. And as in any legal or intellectual community, community, there was nothing “objective” about their project except for the resultant social reality produced by the rationality that the internal logic of their t heir world imposed. As of about the middle of the nineteenth century, Orientalists too made it their business to study what they perceived as Islam; but the manuscripts, archives, and artifacts of that world were patently not deciphered within an Islamic cultural context. 1

 As a rule, and unless otherwise specified or qualified, I use the term “Shar  ! ‘a” ‘a” to refer to the pre-modern experiences of Muslims. As I have argued elsewhere, the modern reincarnation has been eviscerated, rendering at least the institutional structures defunct. See Hallaq, “Can the Shari‘a Be Restored?” in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Barbara F. Stowasser, eds., Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity  (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004): 21-53. 2  Whenever the reference is to the Shar ! ‘a, ‘a, my use of the term “legal” connotes a concept, phenomenon or category that must always be taken as subservient to the moral, this latter being an enveloping structure of norms that, conversely, both subordinates and commands the legal. In a system that did not differentiate between the moral and the legal, but was a comingled admixture of both (as the Shar ! ‘a ‘a was for centuries before the onset of modernity), the segregated uses of the terms, including the “moral,” must be understood as conditioned by modernity’s inescapable  conceptual-linguistic repertoire that insists on corralling the two terms into separate spheres.

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For the first time in the history of Islam, its cultural production, especially its textbased tradition, was to be subjected to an entirely foreign, but also hegemonic and domineering, hermeneutic. This was not an enterprise intent on organizing Europe’s “scholarly curiosity,” but one that effectively appropriated, refracted, and redefined the way Muslims themselves thought about the world. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, no serious Muslim historian, for instance, could even attempt – much less be capable of producing -- a "abarian, Mas‘#dian or Kath ! rian rian history, these standing at one time as indubitable exemplars of Islamic historiographical narratives. Nor was it conceivable in the least that a Juwayn ! , a R $z !  or  or a Nasaf  !  be  be replicated in the Shar ! ‘a ‘a sphere. These paragons of paradigmatic Islamic learning effectively became, nearly overnight, expressions of a dead past. The context of interpretation and the assumptions of Orientalist hermeneutics were entirely and solidly grounded within a distinct and unprecedented intellectual and material European formation, one dominated by a newly forged enlightenment whose values reflected a particular – though narrowly corralled -- conception of reason, and specific, if not unique, notions of secularism, religion, humanness, materialism, capitalism, instrumentality, emotion, pain, violence, and much else. All these categories were no doubt found in the Islamic East (however their boundaries and substantive thickness or thinness may have been defined) but were manifested there in often dramatically different ways, expressed in different forms, and, most importantly, marshaled and utilized for different ends. The Muslim project may be said to have been largely geared toward selfconstruction -- the psychological, moral, and “legal” being paramount and overriding in importance and scope over the material (a category emerging as  paradigmatically3 paramount only with modernity). These aspects were exemplified in the emergence and maintenance of particular theoretical and practical technologies of the self/subject, narratives of collective moral engagement, discursive codes of juridical conduct, and a socio-economic system that ranged in its interests from social organization to economic activity and civil society, to a limited conception and practice of politics, and to much else. The project was chiefly one carried out by the civic order on behalf of and for the sake of that order.4 In this project, “Islam” and things Islamic were the subject, the predicate and the object, all at once.5 3

 An explanation of the theory of paradigms (crucial to my overall argument) is to be found in my Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013): 6-13. 4  An argument advanced in my Impossible State, 37-97, as well as in Shar ! ! ‘a: ‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 125-221, and, in certain respects, developed further in “Regarding Liberty, Freedom, Representation, and the Rule of Law: How would the Shar ! ‘a ‘a Fare?” an unpublished lecture delivered at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, Feb. 4, 2014. 5  In many significant ways, the concept of “Islam” as a generic category in effect represents a modern translation (often crude and reductive) of the various formations that worked together throughout time to produce the conditions of possibility for immensely diverse ways of life that had their common denominator reside in a varied subscription to Islamic conceptions of ethics, morality, mysticism, law, theology, philosophy, economy, or, at times, in as partial a conception as that of religious works (what was generally identified as ‘ibad"t ). ). Yet, the abstracted totality of the historical interactions between and among all these conceptions – as well as their implementation in practice -- would be claimed, for instance, by newly converted societies as their own, and inherited as a matter of course, as if those societies had always been participants in that history (observe, e.g., the history of Islam in the Malay

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The Orientalist project, on the other hand, though similar in some significant ways, was yet profoundly different in others. The subject matter of Orientalism, always the object,6  was by definition not European, although the enterprise itself was conducted by Europeans for Europeans. An instrumental building block of colonialism, the enterprise was an essential part of constructing modernity that initially -- but undoubtedly – reconstituted the life-values and worldview of Europeans. They came to inhabit that modernity, the only world they recognized as having full and autonomous ontological, epistemological and cultural status, and thus legitimacy. The essential difference between the two projects did not thus pertain to the processes of constructing the cultural or psychological self (however different these were in each case), but rather to the teleology of humanity and of the subject, and their place in the world. II In his important work on Orientalism, Edward Said articulated the ways in which the Euro-American culture of power, embodied in its discursive formations, has represented, re-organized and eventually reconstituted the Orient, converting it into a counter image of the Enlightenment, a place that is precisely what Europe is not but one that must constantly strive to become European.7  Said’s narrative, reflecting a particular conception of power and knowledge directly inherited from Foucault, remained faithful to the Enlightenment notions of secular humanism8  and archipelago during the last five or six centuries). It is in this sense that even in hybridity and partiality, these historically claimed formations dictated the actual conditions of the social “subject and the predicate.” 6  In light of the distinctions made in the previous note, the rendering of the formations as an object of inquiry also translates into exteriorization, stripping these formations of temporal relevance and historical-teleological validity. This seems to me oppositional to the claimed legacy I have spoken of in the previous note. Whereas in the native soil the discursive-cum-applied formations would be absorbed  post eventum  post  eventum into the fold as integral to communal memory, they were, at the hands of European philology, not only externalized (psychologically and epistemically) but also lodged in the world of historical past as irrelevant, save for the scholarly curiosity that aims to “understand” that “museumsituated” culture. In due course, I will note the implications of this exteriorization for my overall argument. 7  Edward Said, Orientalism  (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 8  Said’s humanism is not only “a gesture of resistance and critique,” but also a distinct “secular intellectual tradition that sees in unafraid and unapologetic critique the path to human freedom.” (See his “Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (May 2000): 285-91, at 290-91.) Lumping together and equating “ethnicity and sect” (read political violence) with “tradition” and “religion,” Said insists these are “neither adequate as guides to nor useful as modes” for the humanist in “making sense of human history” (ibid; see also Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry [Autumn 2006]: 52-77, at 52-56.). Unlike Scheler and others (including Said’s much admired Vico) who allowed religion the possibility of making as much sense of the world as secular humanist dogma, Said dismissed both tradition and religion out-of-hand, in effect replicating the very biases he critiques in his celebrated book. What remains useful for us in Said’s position on humanism is therefore reduced to that “gesture of resistance and critique.” Humanism then is never concerned with the problems of an anthropocentric existence, as his Humanism and Democratic Criticism  (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) as well as other writings of his attest. Even when drawing on Vico, Said argues for taking seriously the philosopher’s stubborn insistence that men forge their own path and make their own destiny (through resistance and critique, and perhaps through striving?). Yet, Said does not appropriate, and in effect entirely excludes, Vico’s idea of the central importance of religion and

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anthropocentricism. Said was – and I suspect remained so to the end -- blind to the profound effects of the Enlightenment distinction between the Is and Ought as well as between fact and value, thereby failing to see the necessary  effects of the modern project in general, and the liberal project in particular. Said’s work, liberal in every important way, saw light at the end of an era, one that still held some promise for a better future. But since the eighties and the nineties, Said’s cherished values of secular humanism, and especially its implied but ontologically and epistemologically   entailed anthropocentricism have been at the center of critique that recalls the disenchantment with the modern condition of a number of major intellectuals since the eighteenth century (ranging from Herder and Nietzsche, to Max Scheler, the Frankfurt School and beyond). But the critique has become both more trenchant and more urgent since Said wrote. The crucial matter of the survival of the human species was not atop that philosophical agenda, not even on Said’s when he wrote his Orientalism; but now it is, and at every level. One can now speak even of a scientific consensus on climate and ecological crisis.9  Colossal environmental destruction; unprecedented forms of violence; the construction of lethal political identities; the poisoning of food and water; extermination of alarming numbers of species; melting of Himalayan, polar and other major glaciers; increasingly worrying health threats; indecent disparity between rich and poor; social and communal disintegration; the rise of narcissistic sovereign individualism; an alarming increase of mental health disorders; a “growing epidemic” of suicide, and much more (the list is long enough to require, literally, an entire ledger), are now calling attention to a revaluation of modernist, industrial, capitalist 10  and chiefly (though not exclusively) liberal values. The increasingly proliferating and widespread understanding that the modern project, together with its knowledge system, is unsustainable11 (even in the relatively short run) is in the process of taking over center-stage, and not only in Western industrialized countries. Influential activist groups and prominent intellectuals in India, China and several other countries in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, have come to realize that a major restructuring, if not overhauling, of the paradigmatic structures of modernity is now in order.12 The crisis affects the global village, and is not the concern of only particular groups or countries,

providence to society, a “scandalous” “detail” that would perhaps tarnish, in Said’s mind, Vico’s image as an advocate of “human freedom.” Unlike Vico, and situating himself at the center-right of the Enlightenment, Said saw a contradiction between religion and freedom, a contradiction resolved by secular humanism. On some aspects of Vico’s “scandalous” thought, see Robert C. Miner, Vico: Genealogist of Modernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002):  passim  but also see p. 137. 9  Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We Are Not Wrong? in  Joseph F. C. DiMento an d Pamela Doughman, eds., Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren  (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007): 65-99. 10  See thesis 3 in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, 35, 2 (2009): 197-222, especially at 215-17. 11  For a powerful argument in this direction, see Sanjay Seth, “’Once Was Blind but Now Can See’: Modernity and the Social Sciences,” International Political Sociology, 7 (2013): 136-51, especially at 144. 12  On paradigms, see my  Impossible State, 6-13.

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although the genealogy of the sources of destruction are widely recognized as European and more recently Euro-American.13 In the argument I am setting forth here, a series of premises should be made explicit before we proceed further, namely, that (1) the ecological and environmental crisis is endemic to the very modern system producing it, which is to say that the crisis itself is systemic; (2) the modern system that cohesively marshals capitalism, technology, industrialism and a legal system that regulates their conduct is based on forms of knowledge that are claimed to be rational and thus are far from haphazard or accidental; (3) this rationality, in its fully-fledged practical manifestations, in effect amounts to nothing short of an epistemology, a conscious, deliberate and fairly consistent way of understanding, interpreting and living in the world; and (4) this epistemology lacks sufficient moral and ethical content so as to (a) allow living in the world without -- to put it minimally--14 a noticeable penchant for destructiveness; and (b) successfully remedy ecological and environmental problems as may happen to arise. The upshot of these premises is that the present crises are not only indicative, but in fact an integral effect , of the forms of knowledge and ethics commanding modernity as a way of living in the world. It is then wholly plausible to argue that there is “no area of ethical thinking that pushes us to examine the foundations of ethical thought more than environmental ethics.”15  Here, the “foundations of ethical thought” must be understood as entailing virtually the entire range of modern forms of knowledge, especially those involved directly in violent and destructive ventures. The critical global situation during the last three decades calls for a more profound critique of the Orientalist project -- as it does of most others in the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities -- even as Orientalism stands now in its modified form (and despite the due recognition that Orientalism has somewhat changed course after Said’s critique). Said’s own foundational premises are no longer sufficient, and in fact utterly inadequate. Secular humanism, anthropocentricism, and liberalism (all of 13

 In fact, it is plausible to argue, as Andrew Vincent does, that it is the very values and practices of liberal  justice theory that “constitute “cons titute the key environmental environmen tal danger.” Vincent, “Liberalism and the Environment,” Environmental Values, 7 (1998): 443-59, at 443. 14  The minimalism here is intended to avoid entering the fray over whether or not pre-industrial societies contributed to the deterioration of environment and ecology. See, in this respect, the instructive arguments made by Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Nonetheless, these arguments may not be sufficient. Skeptics may still be unconvinced that industrialist society departed radically from earlier epochs of human degradation of the environment, this latter having been less extensive and occurring in piecemeal fashion. But the disagreement cannot be resolved just by recourse to quantitative data. The argument insisting on pre-industrial degradation stands in collusion with a conception of history that is not only pre-determinative but also one that squarely rests on a dogmatic theory of progress. This narrative insists that any society, “civilization” or culture would have done exactly what the west has in fact done had it stood in its place, the logic being that progress is inevitable and that it happens to have (or, alternatively, must have) a price. The question that, among others, is never raised is why didn’t such massive degradations take place elsewhere and before  modern Europe came along. In this narrative, it seems that the questions pertaining to the specific conditions which made destructive modernity possible are readily universalized within a trajectory that knows nothing but predetermined progress. This is not merely a historical force, but metaphysics galore. Further on these themes, see Stephen M. Gardiner,  A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Climat e Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 15  David Schrader, “Living Together in an Ecological Community,”  Journal of Philosophy , 7, 18 (Fall 2012): 42-51, at 42.

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which rest on a mechanistic view of the world), are increasingly viewed as too costly to maintain, and an excessive and unjustifiable -- if not immoral -- overreach, and all this notwithstanding their benefits (undoubted benefits with equally undoubted disastrous side-effects). In fact, it is precisely these benefits – supposed and real – that are directly tied to the pervasive destruction of nearly every aspect of modern human, animal and insentient life (all of which, one can safely say, are experiencing, and living, the modern condition). It is therefore the benefits that we claim to derive from the modern project that does the work of vindicating the moral basis on which the project itself becomes both rationalized and justified. This has been the cornerstone and thrust of Bentham’s and  J.S. Mill’s philosophies, among others, which continue to flourish in various, even pervasive, forms in the twenty-first century, both intellectually and institutionally. Their effects have not been merely practical, in the sense that they afford a guide to an actionable way of life premised on certain foundational conceptions of utility, pleasure and pain. Rather, the effects have gone deep into the formation of the modern subject, determining not only the manner in which that subject understands and interrogates the world, but also, and consequently, how it cognitively situates itself in the world. In order to reckon with the unbearable heaviness of the ensuing contradictions within its fabric, this understanding of the world had to be framed as a theory of morality, a necessary myth that makes irreconcilable contradictions bearable – for, after all, this is precisely one of the functions of myth. Hence, we often encounter the argument that modernity has developed its own concept – if not system – of morality, including the morality (even virtue ethics) of its liberalism, capitalism, Marxism, scientism, and of course the interminably but deliberately vague doctrine of progress. The structure of justification of this morality has behind it a venerable philosophical tradition that begins with Machiavelli and Hobbes down to Rawls, Dworkin and Joseph Raz. The venerability is of course partly associated with intellectual integrity, but not wholly. Venerability, and particularly the much acclaimed universalist validity and relevance, rest on foundations that also have little to do with the honorable weight of intellectual attirement, and much to do with the politics of knowledge and its function in the production of regimes of truth. Upon entry into any debate about the nature of this morality as compared to, say, pre-modern cultural or religious systems, the contention that inevitably arises is one to do with either the superiority of the modern system of value and thus of its moral basis (an honest position openly admitting its structural associations with power-based forms of knowledge), or, at best, of the relativism (and thus subjectivity) involved in weighing one moral system against another (a relativism that does not acknowledge the absolutism of the very system of knowledge which gives rise to it in the first place). The balance between superiority and subjectivity has paradigmatically worked in favor of modern forms of morality, and largely of epistemology, for the colosseum of debate, including its presiding Caesar, remains undeniably modern. In a system that a priori sets limits to what can and cannot be acceptable standards of legitimate discourse, subjectivity and relativism work handin-hand and complement the stance of superiority – that which we know by the name of progress.

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The modern constitution of moral value rests on a posited metaphysic16 of individual freedom and rationality that in turn inheres in an enveloping political and capitalist system of value that shapes the qualities, and therefore  specific types, of freedom and rationality -- all this being a process formative of the self but one that was kept distinct from that   (unacknowledged) metaphysic. Which is to say that it was necessary, in order to maintain the idealized conception of freedom and rationality, to set this ideal apart from the otherwise determining and dominating effects of economy (and to some extent even from state policy of inventing and managing citizenship), and therefore of its metaphysic. Thus the subjectivity of moral value is not to be confused with unintelligible abstractness. When all else fails, a moral system can be judged and adjudicated on less abstract grounds than metaphysics, whether in its coherent or blurred (unacknowledged?) versions. If the structures of technology/technique,17 industrialism, science, rationality, capitalism, and, no less, the nation-state, are admitted to be paradigmatic, defining in the most decisive of ways the contours and substantive content of modern life, then it may not be implausible to regard them as having failed the consumers of the good life who live in  and with  the world rather than above  and against   it, be these consumers human, animal or insentient (this latter being determined as such, like all else, by the admittedly constrained forms of human knowledge). Our concern in all this is of course rationality – presumably that discrete and autonomous process that remains, despite all claims to autonomy, necessarily conditioned by the paradigmatic structures of modernity (not least of which are capitalism, nationalism, industrialism, technology, science, and the entire range of peripheral domains18  that give it severally and aggregately their perspectival props). This rationality, of a specific type and structur e, e, may not be disentangled from modern forms of life, the very forms that have led to the state of current crises. The crises have clearly been precipitated by a human – and no other – agency, one that is selfprofessedly rational,19  but also one whose quest for knowledge is, as Scheler put it 16

 Modernity appears unique in the imperial and “civilization-defined” history of mankind, at least insofar as it is a complex system (perhaps too complex) that has failed to acknowledge and articulate its own metaphysical doctrine. Indeed, any attribution to modern phenomena of a metaphysic has invariably been articulated as a critique of, rather than as an internal elaboration of, the modern project. The denial of the metaphysical doctrinal structure undergirding modernity is, needless to say, deemed both integral and indispensable to the continued justification and survival of the project as a “rational” one – the assumption being that metaphysics is a commodity of myth belonging to a primordial past. See also Jan C. Schmidt, “Defending Hans Jonas’ Environmental Ethics: On the Relation between Philosophy of Nature and Ethics,” Environmental Ethics , 35 (Winter, 2013): 461-79, at 467-69. 17  On technique as technology and its determining role on modern life, see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society , trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964). 18  On peripheral domains as subservient to paradigmatic or central domains, see Hallaq, Impossible State, 6-13. 19  Whence another contradiction in the modern project ensues. Rationality is presumed to be the foundation of Enlightened modernity that moves in a progressive line, always toward a better future; yet, a few would deny that this modernity (or our current condition, at any rate) is heavily involved in less than healthy ways of living, and engendering a marked increase (rather than decrease) of health, economic and environmental-ecological problems, among many others. To exonerate rationality of the outcomes of its own work (as in the claim that side-effects justify the goal, or that side-effects justifiably cannot be foreseen) is to embark on yet another contradiction, namely, that rationality is ipso facto

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aptly, garnered for  systematic   control and domination. 20  And it is this rationality that has dictated the way we construe ourselves as well as the Other in the world, including Islam and its history and cultures. III What are the implications of this crisis in the modern project for the study of Shar ! ‘a? ‘a? To begin with, the implications are foundational, profound, and entirely epistemic, which is to say that much of the way of understanding and doing things in the world now requires rethinking. This is also to say, in the first instance, that the very questions we ask must reflect the new critical reality of the last three decades. This claim, however, demands a clearer vision than I have thus far offered of the context in which such questions might be formulated. When Europe developed Orientalism, it was a project integral to the rise of new economics and forms of politics directed and commanded, respectively, by the nation state. But the project, as a subset of the larger European experiment that created modernity, was profoundly anchored in the paradigmatic concepts of the Enlightenment (however much it may be seen nowadays to have gone astray). It is in this sense that Orientalism was a project of culture, and not merely an academic enterprise. And as such, it was most natural for the agents of this enterprise to operate within the cultural boundaries that modernity had come to require or, more precisely, determine. Whether Orientalists wanted it or not, they all (or nearly all) engaged in the production of that culture, and thus consciously or not, willingly or not, contributed to the formation of that culture, which was deeply rooted in a massive colonialist project that involved a structured and pervasive market of slavery,21  economic exploitation, and control and subjection of the lives of countless millions of non-Europeans (and disenfranchised Europeans as well). 22  This is the world into which Orientalism was born, and it was this world that it lived in and served. By the middle of the twentieth century, and with the majority of “third world” countries gaining so-called “independence,” Orientalism entered a new, postcolonialist stage, one that left it with residues of the colonialist heritage, but with new forms of power. This stage, beginning sometime after World War II and partly ending in the eighties, shifted the focus of the field from direct forms of colonialism and its deficient, unreliable, and cannot provide solutions to the very problems that it, through human agency, creates. This is not all, however. This rationality descends furthermore into metaphysics, the same kind of traditional metaphysics that our secular world vehemently shuns. The stubborn insistence on the belief that our rationality and its resultant sciences can and will accomplish our ideals has developed into a theology, if not a myth; namely, that like God, reason and rationality as conceived by modernity must be served irrespective of how punitive they are or might become. This is no different than the inquisition besetting Biblical Job, who accepts God’s severe punishment in the hope of salvation. 20  Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge , trans. M. Frings (London: Routledge, 1980): 78, 118, 119; W. Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge  (London: Routledge, 1960): 114-15. 21  A “market” (economic, cultural and ideational) that was essential for the development of liberalism itself. On the connections between ideals of liberal thought and slavery, violence, colonialism and horror/demonization, see Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History  (London: Verso, 2011); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents  (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Panjak Mishra’s useful review essay “Bland Fanatics,” London Review of Books , vol. 37, No. 23 (December 3, 2015): 37-40; and Elisabeth Anker, “The Liberalism of Horror,” Social Research, 81, 4 (Winter 2104): 795-823. 22  The Basks, Irish, and Quebecers being prime examples.

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 justification as mission civilisatrice  to one of re-elaboration and adjustment of the ways in which the “Orient” was now to be seen. It was owing to a shift from a conception of the modalities of reconstituting and governing it in effective terms to a strategy (again, conducted through representation) of how to deal with it, that it now gained “independence” and presumably the ability to represent itself (now that it has become reconstituted). Whether under the colonialist forms of the nineteenth century or the still hegemonic influences of most of the twentieth, the prevailing attitude was always one of strength and power: what Europe has said and done was the norm, the standard and decisive way according to which the world must be run, even seen. This remained the case to a significant degree even after the Saidian critique, although the attitude toward the Muslim world after the rise of Islamist movements was one heavily colored by a renewed fear of Islam and its “political” (and often cultural and “religious”) threat. Nonetheless, Orientalism in this latter phase acquired a diversity that is patently unprecedented. Its narratives and sub-narratives have been highly contentious, this time integrating not only “native” voices who have militated against it from within, but also enlisting an array of scholarly voices who are otherwise ethnically and culturally embedded within the West and its dominant academic institutions. Yet, the paradigmatic narratives of this varied tradition we call Orientalism remain highly politicized: the field generally remains preoccupied with what might be called the relationship of Islam to the West and the world (the directionality of this relationship being precisely that). Whether sympathetic or hostile to “Islam” as a religion or culture, the concern is with representing it to the West with a view to equipping the latter with a “better” and “more accurate” way of “understanding” it. Clearly, a majority of Orientalists are no longer sympathetic to their governments’ policies as carried out in Muslim countries (a stark contrast with nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars, notwithstanding the rare, even at times powerful, exceptions23), but the general preoccupation remains representation “so that we know how to deal with Muslims,” although this “dealing” often aspires to a set of attitudes that show relatively more respect and tolerance than any preceding period. But the common denominator of Orientalist academia undoubtedly remains one of epistemic superiority, which is to say that respect and tolerance come with a doze of epistemic self-confidence that still assumes – consciously or not -- the validity of the EuroAmerican modern project, especially as it has been guided by the paradigmatic principles of the Enlightenment. One is tempted to say that it is only because Said’s critique remained foregrounded in a liberal, incurably secularist understanding of the world – as well as in a particular conception of humanism -- that Western academia took his work so seriously. It represented, despite an initial opposition to its message, a necessary inoculation – a much needed correction from within liberalism to liberal discourse itself.24 23

 I have in mind examples like Louis Massignon and, most notably, Ren  Gu n. For the latter, see Paul Chacornac, The Simple Life of Ren  Gu n, trans. Cecil Bethell (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001). 24  The implications of this diagnosis are of course grave, for if Said’s critique squarely rested, as it did, on liberal foundations, then the very question of what is Orientalism (as apposed to its effects, which he studied) remains entirely unexplored, both in the Saidian and post-Saidian projects. It is the contention here that a satisfactory answer to this foundational question precludes both liberal analytical tools and an applied liberal epistemology, the reason being that satisfactory answers to the question require an analytical-theoretical apparatus whose location lies outside the boundaries not only of liberalism but

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It is the argument of this essay that such epistemic self-confidence, as well as the concomitant corrective measures, are neither justified nor, respectively, sufficient – and that the earlier they are abandoned the better. The implications of such a stance are admittedly grave: the radical crisis of the modern project in Euro-America, as elsewhere, demands a radical solution, a fact that bears directly on how we should henceforth study Islam, its Shar ! ‘a ‘a and nearly everything else. At the center of this argument stand two essential facts, namely, (1) that the crises of the modern project are global, in both causes and effects,25  which is to say that the modern structures productive of the ill-effects have spread to all continents and are currently found in nearly every country, to one degree or another; and (2) that every sector of ill-effect has impacted material and social reality in virtually all aspects of existence. The disappearance of one species or the pollution or deforestation of one region has created chain reactions negatively impacting ecological and social balance in other spheres. And if the crisis is undeniably common to all, in effect representing a serious threat to the natural and social commons, then the t he commensurate moral responsibility (assumed here to be more binding than any legal or political responsibility) must be borne by all those who have a say about it. IV Since states and governments have either shirked that moral responsibility or otherwise felt incompetent to offer any significant solution to the crisis, it falls to the intellectual traditions of the world to take up the challenge, and Orientalism is undoubtedly one such tradition that must now face up to that challenge. And it is through undertaking this challenge in meaningful ways that it can transform itself from a parochial, if not politically and theoretically backward, tradition into one that can contribute, however modestly, to pioneering a promising future and to building a sustainable path for humanity. If the equivalent traditions in China, Latin America and especially India can chart innovative ways in this direction, there is no reason why Orientalism cannot find its own way toward such a worthwhile goal. This, for Orientalism, is a particularly urgent moral requirement, since, as has been rightly argued, “ecological crisis is the product of a culture, originating in Western Europe, which now dominates the world.”26 Essentially and originally a product of Europe, Orientalism has evolved as an intellectual tradition representing, if not encapsulating, what I have elsewhere called the paradigms of modernity and the Enlightenment.27 It has been largely – though not exclusively --defined by a potent theory of progress, with an omnipotent and metaphysically latent concept of linear history. It is also considerably liberal in its also and mainly of the central domains and structural paradigms  of the modern project (domains whose diagnostic expression is liberalism, among other less important phenomena). 25  Although it is eminently arguable that despite the global spread of modern technology and industry, the destructive effects have been far greater on the non-Euro-American world than the latter world was responsible for the causes of destruction. 26  Arran Gare, “MacIntyre, Narratives, and Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Ethics, 20 (Spring 1998): 3-21, at 14; Schmidt, “Defending Hans Jonas,” 463. 27  W. Hallaq, “On Orientalism, Self-Consciousness and History,” Islamic Law and Society , 18 (2011): 387-439; idem., Impossible State, passim.

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disposition, even in the devastating critiques leveled against it-- Said’s being the most prominent case in point. But above all, it lends itself to the characterization that it is, in the coinage of MacIntyre, a rational tradition of inquiry, but one that encapsulates the imperatives of the Euro-American modern paradigm. In its entirety, and with all its internal disagreements and divergences across nearly two centuries of its existence, it continues to lend itself to the definition (again by MacIntyre) that it is an extended argument through time in which fundamental agreements are defined and constantly redefined in the context of debates within it, and (tacitly) outside it.28  If it does not exhibit on the surface all the features of a tradition (such as a conception of justice or a particular view of practical rationality), it is not because these features do not exist: they do, albeit in a tacit and un-articulated manner, for such paradigmatic features as a particular conception of rationality, a theory of progress, a linear notion of history, and a liberal conception of reality (including a latent theory of justice and ethics) -- all govern its narratives and internal logic  in  in structured ways. As a tradition of rational inquiry, Orientalism directly confronts other traditions of equally rational nature but differing in their conception of rationality (the assumption being that every tradition has its own version of rational method derived from its own experience and view of the world, including traditions based on what – as outsiders -- we might characterize as mythological, metaphysical or otherwise).29 These have been called rival traditions, not necessarily in the sense of incompatibility that bars dialogue, but rather in the sense of difference that in fact compels these rival traditions to engage in dialogue with a view to (re-)evaluate their own narratives, defend them, justify them or modify them as a response to the challenge from another tradition. In some cases, the rivaling tradition comes associated with political and military power that overwhelms and eventually destroys a rivaling tradition. An example in point is Orientalism itself, as it existed and operated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the lands of Islam. But there are other examples of traditions that have been forced to modify their internal narratives under the intellectual pressure and stress of other rival traditions, of the sort that MacIntyre studied in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry . As an expression of Western modernity and European Enlightenment, Orientalism now faces an unprecedented intellectual, but specifically epistemological, challenge. It must reckon with the devastating ill-effects of the paradigmatic socioepistemic structures that have given rise to it. But before suggesting ways to cope with this challenge, I must resolve a problem posed by the works of MacIntyre and Said, both of whose writings bear direct relevance on the t he present discussion. It is by now abundantly acknowledged that MacIntyre has “ignored the relationship between traditions and power,”30 limiting the conflict between traditions to the challenge of rational inquiry. More a case of deontological aspiration than an actual description of reality, his account fails to consider the success of a tradition as a result of sheer raw power, and not necessarily rational power. MacIntyre’s entire 28

 A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Which Rationality  (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988): 12. 29  Patrick Joyce, “The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History in Britain,” Past and Present , 158 (1998): 223. 30  Gare, “MacIntyre, Narratives, and Environmental Ethics,” 10.

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corpus of work has, for instance, nothing descriptive or analytical in it that accounts for the demise of the pre-modern Islamic tradition in its encounter with European colonialism and imperialism. That encounter offered only a minimal dose of rational debate, on which MacIntyre exclusively depends for his argument, and this, if it transpired at all, took place only after the fact of domination through military, economic, and political – if not extraordinarily violent -- colonial ventures. 31  Yet, his account, as I will propose, might be the most promising prescription for future action if we agree that what all traditions currently share is a global threat of disaster, and thus a set of globally shared concerns. But to modify and expand MacIntyre’s theory of tradition does not necessarily mean that it must be reinterpreted in light of the Saidian theory of power as adapted from Foucault. Inasmuch as MacIntyre’s theory needs modification and expansion, Said’s theory calls for a similar amount of reinterpretation; for, arguably, Foucault’s theory seems to me readily amenable to a more flexible reinterpretation than Said seems to have allowed for in his adaptation of the latter’s conceptions. In his fully justifiable zeal to critique Orientalism, Said perceived discursive formations as controlling the range of objects within a system of knowledge, thereby corralling individual discursive voices into rules of construction that strive to operate within a posited parameter of of truth. These formations are always always integral to a system of domination that at once enunciates a system of truth, entailing, among other things, disciplining the bodies and the production thereof of the docile subject, all this being one and the same operation. This is to argue, in other words, that claims of knowledge and the exercises of power are not only interconnected, but also organically and systemically non-dissociable. The organic unity of power and knowledge thus explains the function of representations produced by colonial Europe of the Orient, representations shaped by predetermined formations of power that foreground the Orient in the image of European learning, consciousness and worldview. One critic has argued that Said’s starting point is without foundation. Taking over “Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy, [Said] is in the awkward position of condemning not only most, but all, Orientalists because he has virtually presupposed that there is no such thing as the understanding of other cultures, that statements or representations can be nothing but exercises of power as parts of discursive formations. And at the same time he has undermined any basis to justify his own critique.”32 By generalizing Foucault’s critique, Said is thus said to have foreclosed on any other course of action, which is to say that he has potentially obviated the MacIntyrian possibility of one tradition representing another, of entering with it into a rational inquiry that may result in the reassessment and adaptation of the representing – and not necessarily only the represented -- culture. Yet, if we accept this description of Said’s preoccupation with a de facto  case study (i.e., actual practices of Orientalism within a colonial world), and not, like MacIntyre, with an interpretive possibility for future action, then we may forgive him for his analysis of a past and present in which, it is true, even divergent “positive”

31

 An account of this history may be found in Hallaq, Shar ! ! ‘a ‘a, 357-550.  Arran E. Gare, “Understanding Oriental Cultures,” Philosophy East and West , 45, 3 (July 1995): 309-328, at 315. See also Anidjar, “Secularism,” 56-58. 32

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representations made and continue to make little difference to the functioning of an overwhelming colonial power. 33 Nonetheless, it is also possible to see in Said a narrowing of possibilities even in Foucaultian terms. Foucault, I think, allowed for a more complex picture of power, having viewed discourses as capable of existing, at one and the same time, and in the same context, within oppositional trajectories. These oppositional discourses could conceivably remain inseparable since they “are tactical elements or blocks operating in a field of force relations” that can exist as “different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.”34 In the colonialist context of conquest and rupture, hegemonic strategies cannot – indeed -- turn into their opposites, for if they did, there would emerge the absurdity of the perfect interchangeability of actor and subject, of subject and predicate. This dynamic of power was possible in the staggered, cross-fertilizing, and symbiotic socio-economic and political systems of Europe, but not within a geographically and culturally segregated Afro-Asian countries, where the “tactical elements” could not travel beyond their own field of force relations. Thus, the processes and strategies of power – in their confluence and opposition – must yield particular effects that both directly and obliquely flow from these processes processes and strategies. That power can neither exercise exercise total control, nor precisely predict its own effects, is evident both in Foucault’s Europe and in the colonial laboratory. But this is not to agree with the argument that in the colonial context the same strategy, as opposed to the effect, can itself turn into an “opposing strategy.” For to argue this position with regard to Europe’s colonialist ventures would amount not merely to undermining the very nature of power, but to depriving it fully of its own  agency, let alone potency. This is what Said was talking about, but it is not all that Foucault allowed for. Put differently and in a simplified form, Foucault’s theory – as I understand it – implies, though it does not consciously articulate, a distinction between what I would call the mechanics and substance of power. The mechanics of power are to be found everywhere, and their logic governs its operation universally. In its logic of mechanics, power may well militate against itself. But the substance of power can circulate and change, at times from one kind to its opposite. In their temporality, the agents of power normatively do not themselves undergo change, nor can they turn into their own opposites. But they themselves can can change as sites of power. If transformations within power’s substantive structures were not possible, then we would be unable to explain how, for instance, modern Europe emerged out of its pre-modern Christianmonarchical self. With its own  episteme and formation of power, modernity sprang from a pre-modern system of knowledge and control.35  And to appreciate the 33

 For a more favorable interpretation of Said’s position, see Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Edward Said and the Political Present,”  American Ethnologist , 32, 4 (November 2005): 538-55. However, such favorable allowances cannot travel far enough, since Said’s mild approval of certain Orientalists (like Massignon) does not amount to an articulated and theoretically self-conscious attitude. Said simply did not develop a theoretical position outside of, or beyond, the unilinear trajectory of power structure within the colonizing-colonized setting. 34  M. Foucault, History of Sexuality , vol. 1, trans., Robert Hurley (London: Pantheon, 1978): 101-2. 35  W. Hallaq, Shar ! ! ‘a: ‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 6-12. The argument that power, by its very nature, substantively militates against itself is, I think, little

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possibilities of present and future transformations, we must identify the core assumptions of Christian-monarchical Europe that were converted into their “opposites.” Among others, it is eminently arguable that a changing attitude toward the physical world represented a locus of structural  substantive change. Viewing nature as conquerable, as anything but an enchanted existence, permitted a mechanical view of the world that in turn opened it up to exploitation. Nothing in it remained sacred, and everything became (at least potentially) subject to control and domination, not excluding the “noble savage” who is an “extension of the state of nature.” Of course, this is a continuation of a Christianity of redemption and self-denial, but it is nonetheless Christianity under a different guise – precisely what Foucault has allowed for within a power theory of oppositional trajectories. The core assumption of control of nature, it must not be forgotten, emerged out of a European Christian dogma,36 but also as a reaction to it;37 for when even Hobbes advanced his revolutionary and influential idea of the body politic, he did so under the secularized assumption of a divine creation in which the Lord made the world for Man to run, having Himself left the scene upon that fateful act. (In more than one sense, this Hobbesian transmutation also characterizes the Schmittian over-arching argument that the central concepts of modern politics are secularized reincarnations of their Christian predecessors.) Secularizing Hobbes – at the end of the day – emerges out of a religious Hobbes. V Be that as it may, MacIntyre’s theory of rival traditions can therefore survive Said’s purported foreclosures and further enlist Foucault’s complex and dynamic notion of power in its service. In fact, if one considers rationality a form of power, then there would be no divergence between Foucault’s theory and that of MacIntyre, for understood, and one that seems to escape many of the critics of my The Impossible State. The implication of the critics’ argument is that any critique of modernity is ipso facto modern and that by virtue of the very fact that it springs from a modern habitat, it must  per force  be embedded within the deep structures of this habitat -- thus left eternally unable to transcend either the boundaries or constraints laid against it by the modern condition. This familiar argument misses the methodological and theoretical significance of evolutionary laws as well as historical processes of the kind that longue-durée  narratives competently address (notwithstanding reservations regarding a certain version of the latter; see n. 45, below). The critics do not seem to realize that the logical conclusion of their critique would mean that history (both human and natural) would simply not be ontologically possible, and along with it the entirety of our body of knowledge of ourselves. This critique therefore descends into utter nihilism. Just as Hellenism emerged out of the Phoenician-Egyptian “civilization,” the Roman world out of the Hellenistic-Semitic cultures, Islam out of the cultures of Late Antiquity, and modernity out of the European Middle Ages, there will be a time when modernity, with its massive structures of power, will have to gradually give way to another age or to a different human condition. However power and history are calculated, none of these historical, contemporary, and future transformations can be explicable or made intelligible outside the theory of the internal dynamics of power (it being taken for granted here that power within the same system does not have to be always associated with a particular kind, e.g. oppressive, dominating, charismatic, ethical or otherwise). See also n. 41, below. 36  See, for instance, Ian Harbour, Western Man and Environmental Ethics: Attitudes Toward Nature and Technology  (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1973): 5-7, as well as Lynn White’s celebrated article therein, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” 18-30. $( ,-.

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rationality would then operate as an integral “tactical” element in the “field of force relations.” In other words, its place would be comfortably located within the mechanics of power. And it is precisely here, in the most unlikely of places, that Orientalism can provide an oppositional discourse that facilitates the change needed to deal with the crises generated by the modern project. I would venture to argue that Orientalism occupies a privileged epistemic position that can allow it to accomplish this task, precisely due to its unique location (as a specialist in Islamic history and culture) in the current systems of knowledge. As a tradition of rational inquiry, Orientalism presently finds itself within a culture dominated by an awareness of the ecological crisis, to which this culture contributed, and continues to contribute, in large measure. This culture is obviously not just a set of ideas, but also an agglomerated structure of practices, social and scientific institutions, popular, national and artistic narratives, and a variety of traditions of inquiry and discursive practices. It clearly exhibits an endless variety of such institutions, narratives and traditions; but, as I have argued elsewhere, all of these are governed by certain central domains or paradigmatic structures, 38  not least of which is a particular concept of rationality, a particular worldview of materialism and economy (modern capitalism), an entrenched – and nearly unconscious – theory of progress, a dangerously linear concept of history, and most significantly, a mechanistic view of the world that differentiates between fact and value, creating an attitude to the world and nature that has proven utterly disastrous for the world. All these central domains regulate a particular structure of human action, one that is no longer just western. All other traditions and institutions, weather having survived the thick dust of history or modern counter-narratives and even practices, have been struggling against these central domains, often relegated to the margins. It is crucial here to place the right importance on the malleability of the ideas of the central domains, since these ideas not only dictate the actual courses of action but they always have the potential to affect, integrate, and transform traditions of inquiry. Indeed, they themselves have internal dynamic force-fields that are capable of challenging the very narratives making up the larger cultural traditions of a society. The absence of such a power source in any tradition inevitably ushers in the collapse or destruction of the entire culture that it sustains. This, for instance, is what happened to Islamic culture during the nineteenth century, when its force-field that once allowed it to adapt itself to worldly realities has nearly suddenly ceased to function in the face of the dramatic and  structurally violent colonial assault of Europe. This is the moment when cultures, together with their traditions of inquiry, die out. In the face of the ecological and environmental crises (here assumed to be symptomatic of deep structural problems in the modern project), a reassessment of the central domains of the project is in order. For Orientalism to survive as a tradition of rational inquiry, it must reckon with the emerging need for an internal critique, one that rationality demands. This internal critique has proven its own validity and necessity in countless other traditions (and even social movements) in the West but also elsewhere. In addition to the “Green philosophers” of Euro-America, India and China, the academic fields of history, philosophy, environmental science, and even 38

 See n. 3, above.

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engineering, among others, are now undergoing self-evaluation, however meager these efforts have been in relation to the colossal magnitude of the crises. Entire programs, departments, institutes, scholarly journals and much else are being established with a speed that only underlines the sense of urgency. Orientalism has not so far picked up on these trends in any remarkable way. But its privileged epistemic site and vast erudition give it great potential to catch up and perhaps even provide leadership. During the last three decades or so, there have emerged important movements and scholarly groups in China and India that bank on a heuristic retrieval of premodern tradition and religion in an effort to combat the modern structures of power that have contributed to the deterioration and destruction of the natural habitat. They have rejected the modern western attitude toward nature and the environment, especially its non-organicist and mechanical view that has denuded nature of any metaphysics. Science of the kind that is harnessed with a single-minded ambition to serve the ends of greedy capitalist ventures and to exploit the natural commons is now regarded as violent in the extreme, destroying the lives of people, cultures and sustainable habitats and traditions.39 They have also rejected the exclusivity of a linear concept of history, having stressed the need to expand the concept to include what has been called circulatory history, a rich and fertile notion that converts the modernistic view of history from a national and thus ideological project into an ethical conception that treats the other in history with appropriate epistemic respect. Most significantly, they have come to spurn the worldview of fragmented reality, a worldview that has proven its utter failure to see the interconnectedness of the various aspects of life in the world -- human, animal animal and insentient. The common denominator of Asian environmental movements is their refusal to separate ecology, environment and the physical world, on the one hand, from an enveloping frame of metaphysical unity, on the other -- where the intrinsic value of physical objects is rationally posited rather than “rationally” proven (just as we presume people innocent until proven guilty, without having to develop an entire philosophical field to prove the rationality of this proposition). This is precisely where Euro-American environmentalism faces a crucial difficulty, for its essentially Enlightenment concept of rationality has been incapable – as I show elsewhere40 -- of providing the logical and epistemological link necessary to assign intrinsic value to insentient life. The failures of Western anthropocentricism and rationality therefore invites further reflection on the heuristic sources needed to supplement, if not displace, the Western search for an exit from the current ecological (and thus epistemological) predicament. It need not be overemphasized that such an exit cannot merely consist of  yet another “modern” solution to a modern problem. This approach has been tried over and over again only to meet with failure. A solution to the crises of modernity cannot be modern, in the sense of applying traditionally-modern methods to problems 39

 See, for instance, Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Zhao Tingyang, “A Political World Philosophy in Terms of All-under-heaven (Tian-xia),” Diogenes , 56, 5 (2009): 5-18; Xiang Shiling, “A Study on the Theory of ‘Returning to the Original’ and ‘Recovering Nature’ in Chinese Philosophy,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China , 3, 4 (2008): 502-19; Mukul Sharma, Green and Saffron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics  (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012). 40  See Hallaq, “The Metaphysics of Gratitude: Anthropocentricism versus Ethicocentricism,” in Hallaq, ReCiting the Quran to Modernity  (in progress).

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resulting from modern paradigmatic structures.41 The solution furthermore cannot be limited to an in situ, localized, diagnosis – again a perception that is the result of a notoriously fragmented view of reality. Rather, the diagnosis must go to the deep structures of modernity, and thus of existence, for it is quite obvious that an economic problem is never just in or about economics, and a political problem is never just in or about politics. The core values of the system -- political, economic, psychological, social, and otherwise – must be subjected to scrutiny as an aggregate group  of problems, as a holistic phenomenon. VI Thus Orientalists, who are among the most erudite students of Islam, may now be forced to shift direction and develop a new theory – philological or otherwise – for their study of the subject. The needed change will have to involve a move from an extroverted concern to an introverted one. The study of Islam, insofar as it has been conducted to this point, has in effect resulted in domination and violence, notwithstanding the good intentions of certain individual scholars. 42  This is extroverted Orientalism. The new approach will avoid such consequences, and at once harness the Islamic heritage for self-constructive projects. This would be introverted Orientalism, an approach that will help the self  first , and hopefully the Other as well, to understand the ways in which Islamic cultures of pre-modernity – in their organicist view of the world and of living in it -- can provide heuristic sources for articulating new ways of living. The first task in the study of Shar ! ‘a ‘a is to treat it as a rational project, however much (or precisely because) its rationality differs from the thinking to which we have grown accustomed. Once the internal logic   of this tradition is unraveled, the project should make as much sense to us as any other (despite the nonconformity of certain of its derivative rules to modern taste, rules we may set aside without prejudice to the general precepts from which they derive). In light of a certain critical assessment of modernity, this logic may be deemed normative and readily accessible to us. Take, for instance, Max Scheler’s critique of modern life, a critique that can hardly be dismissed 41

 While I take it for granted that non-modern discourse within modernity is both an ontological and epistemological impossibility, I draw a distinction between paradigmatic discourse – that which represents the enduring power and perpetuation of the central domains – and subversive discourse, that which is embedded in the multi-layered constitution of substantive power, often but not always associated with peripheral domains. (See discussion toward the end of section IV, above, for the distinction between the substance and mechanics of power). For instance, a re-enchanted philosophy of the world insisting on subordinating capitalism, materialism, and secular humanism to an organicist, mildly mystical, ethicocentric, and non-fragmented/integrated view of the world is no doubt a modern creation and no more than a re-enactment of a modern narrative whose authenticity cannot be validated outside of a squarely modern conception of reality. Yet, this very modern conceptualization – integral to the discourse of power – substantively militates against the paradigmatic domains, both as a discourse and as a structure of power. It does so as a substantive alternative to the dominant forms of knowledge and power, an alternative that – by virtue of its drastically different conception of the world – provides a qualitatively and (perhaps “genetically”) different kinds of solutions than those produced by modernity’s paradigmatic domains. Also see n. 35, above. 42  On individual intention within the Orientalist sociology of knowledge, see Hallaq, “On Orientalism, Self-Consciousness and History,” 407-08, 412, 416.

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as anything less than modern to the core. Nor can it be accused of being anti-modern; in fact, the label of post-modern may be apt, though insufficient. Scheler very much sounds like any Muslim jurist or theologian when he argues that the cosmos contains an underlying ethical order, and that it is integral to its essence to be connected to a transcendental deity. The cosmos, for him, is a divine order, a Qur’ $nic and cherished Islamic concept  par excellence. Because the ordo amoris exhibits the moral character of the cosmos, humankind is intimately connected to the world in every way they are able to love. Much like Muslim intellectuals, both jurists and mystics and a combination thereof, Scheler argues that the heart (Ar. qalb) “deserves to be called the core of man as a spiritual being much more than knowing and willing do.”43 As Timothy McCune has perceptively explained, one need not be inclined toward theistic views or accept any traditional concept of divinity to appreciate, or even accept, Scheler’s argument.44  The entire range of Islamic traditions – Qur’$nic, Shar‘ !   ! , Sufi, theological, metaphysical, historical – rests on this kind of attitude, an attitude that dictates much of what these traditions -- in general and in particular – consider essential on the cosmological, ontological and (especially) epistemological levels. Likewise, these traditions -- and the Shar ! ‘a ‘a no doubt foremost among them -cannot conceive of the world as anything other than interconnected, the unity of the cosmos reigning as a supreme doctrine (and not only in Sufism). Stemming from the idea of ontological design – that everything in the world has a reason to exist – emerges the concept of the sacredness of life, human or otherwise. This is an overwhelmingly foundational concept of the Shar ! ‘a, ‘a, and it stands at the core of many principles and rules across the entire span of  fiqh doctrines. Equally pervasive and counter-modern is the primacy of human value over material worth in human relationships. In this worldview, capitalism and instrumentalism are relegated to a secondary status, answering to the diagnosis that in modernity humans have lost a sense of who they are and what their purpose in life is. In this system of thought and action, the value of humanity paradigmatically resides in communal love, the community being the ultimate measure of existence. (This is why it is impossible to comprehend juristic works without an adequate understanding of Islamic communal structures). The forgoing doctrines and principles, governing, among others, the entire structure and values of the Shar ! ‘a, ‘a, represent the substrate of a world of discourse that may be utilized heuristically for a study of Islam within the context of the critique of modernity’s current crises. The study of the Shar ! ‘a, ‘a, as indeed of Islam as a whole, holds limited promise and viability as long as it is not informed by the most pertinent and overarching theoretical concerns of our day. Preoccupation with what we call microhistory can be validated only by reference to, and with an understanding of, the structural and paradigmatic features not only of macro-history and longue-durée ,45 but also those of an emerging critique whose starting point is the environmental crisis – 43

 Cited in McCune, “Solidarity of Life,” 57. Cf. Ghazz $l ! ’s ’s discourse on qalb in I # y"’ ‘Ul $m al-D! n, vol. 1 (Aleppo, 2004): 117-22, 209-24. 44  Ibid. 45  The re-emergence of longue-durée  history (particularly as exemplified in J. Guldi and D. Armitage, The History Manifesto [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014]) suffers from certain structural problems, on grounds of modernist and largely Eurocentric standards, but also on the grounds that this conception of longue-durée  fails to give credit to (if not even understand the significance of) circulatory history, stubbornly insisting on linear and singular historical time.

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crisis, we have insisted, that are symptomatic of a larger epistemological and therefore ethical deficit (one that stems from an ethical structure that is designed to operate exclusively within economic and political considerations). It might seem to us a perfectly legitimate project of research to study, say, a ruler’s intervention in market activity during a particular dynastic period. Yet, the legitimacy of the project rests on a host of broader questions inevitably informed by even larger philosophical and theoretical considerations. Reducing methodological concerns to the common modernist assumptions about, say, the role of “state” in the management or control of the Shar ! ‘a ‘a is not only a narrow and highly biased way of studying history, but it also represents a distorted view of reality, both of Islam’s as well as of ours. Research projects of this kind, while seemingly acceptable and valid, clearly lack theoretical and even conceptual clarity, not to mention intellectual maturity. They only tell us, or presume to tell us, how things happened in an Islamic instance (what we call “a particular context”) from a modernist perspective, the same perspective that is now being critiqued and rejected as the source of the very crises that humanity is experiencing. Such ventures, it must be recognized, are nearly always situated within a latent context of (oppositional) comparison with a modern (or rather modernist) situation, one that has driven the question of research in the first place. 46  This has been the general approach of much recent scholarship, as evidenced, among other things, in the proliferation of studies on women and gender issues “in Islam,” on social and economic practices within the parameters of “Shar ! ‘a ‘a and state,” and on what might be called a “hero history” that re-entrenches (after early forms of Orientalism) the “civilizational influence” a master-jurist exercised over an entire legal-moral tradition, thereby disregarding the discursive traditions without which no jurist could have been constructed as an authority in the first place.47 Such topics of research – as important as they may be -- have no future promise without reckoning with the immediate and critical questions of the day, those that are increasingly compelling us to interrogate the very foundations of the premises underlying these fields. If we assume, as we should, that knowledge is never innocent of the social, conceptual, material, political and power networks within which it is cultivated, then engaging in knowledge production – inter alia the mission and, indeed, raison d’etre of the scholar – comes with a grave ethical and moral responsibility. As an instrument of power, knowledge is a weapon that can inflict cruel violence. 48 To cultivate it within an ethical framework is to engage in a series of self-interrogations about the justifiability of the very concept of scholarship in the first place; why, that is, the very choice of entering into this  domain of production. But whatever supposes itself to be an explanation, justification or rationalization of the choice of entering does in no way 46

 Not to mention the anachronistic implications of such projects, implications that have far too long escaped the standard definition of anachronism. 47  The most intellectually problematic of such research questions is the sort which proceeds with an inquiry, posited as self-evident, as to why a certain concept or practice “did not develop” or “failed to develop” in Islam (or anywhere else in Asia and Africa), where the governing assumption is the success of the concept or practice in modernity. 48  The assumption being that violence extends over a wide typological spectrum, ranging from the natural violence of birth (seen, if at all, as happy and blissful violence) to the coercive violence involved in cultivating the disciplinarian technologies of the moral self, a type that one may characterize as ethical violence.

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circumscribe or circumvent the ethical quality of the derivative questions that the scholar asks of the field, and what it is that the answers to these questions aim to accomplish. The prevalent attitude within professional historiography is of course that history is a field of knowledge, and as such, any question posed within its boundaries is as legitimate as the next. In other words, who is to say what is a legitimate or valid historical question and what is not. The entire range of historical space and time is equally open to investigation, without prejudging the legitimacy of membership qua membership. Only the results or answers given to the initial question are subjected to evaluation as good, bad, solid, persuasive, flimsy or otherwise. But as a rule the very questions or choices of historical topics are never themselves interrogated. No one, to my knowledge, has ever cast a shadow of doubt on a historian’s work insofar as the topics chosen for study are concerned, be they minting practices under the Qing dynasty, the uses and economy of salt in the New Kingdom of Pharaonic Egypt, the structure of Mamluk armies, filth in nineteenth century Paris, or the history of mosquitos in the Malayas. The non-restrictive, freely open attitude is largely the function of the foundational assumption that history is there for us to discover, that its truths are ultimately objective, and that it is -- in a mimesis with the natural sciences (a model that history always subconsciously aspired, however unsuccessfully, to replicate)-knowable. Undeniably, the widespread belief among professional professional historians is that history and historiography are cumulative in nature, revisionist along the way, but ultimately destined toward a teleology, namely, discovering a particular truth about a period, a field or sub-field, an event, a dynasty, an emperor, an economy, or an “issue” in an endless series of “issues.” All this race for the “truth” of history is also claimed to be self-evident, as an endeavor that is intrinsically valuable and in need of no prior  justification. Knowledge, including historical knowledge, is self-justifying. Yet, as many a critique have shown, the project of history and historiography are implicated in the power structures of the modern nation-state, a venture that has been undeniably associated with cruel violence and destruction. The inquisitive freedom afforded by the discipline of historiography replicates those freedoms propounded in liberal democracies, freedoms unquestioned as long as they operate, more or less, within both the acceptable norms within the profession and the forms of knowledge that regulate a particular view of history (the liberal parallel to these is the socio-political order and the knowledge forms governing capitalist modes of production, forms that in turn determine the teleology teleology of that that order). It is, for instance, a canonical truth of professional historiography to reject any understanding oppositional to its concept of Enlightenment reason that, for instance, separates between fact and value, a sacred distinction in the very natural sciences that it strives so hard to imitate. It would be an incurable sacrilege therefore to even gesture toward the possibility that history has, in the main, no other function than to provide ethical instruction. Such a heresy is inextricably entailed by another pervasive creed that dominates the very course and content of historiographical hist oriographical practice. Walter Mingolo has argued that modernity’s concept of history is singular, recognizing a single line of narrative. When a new development occurs, what existed before it is

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pushed back into the past, precisely into “history” and the “historical.” 49 This process, pervasively epistemological, carries with it profound implications, since the very conception of linear, singular history, coupled with a trenchant doctrine of progress, always locates the past within the marginal and less privileged. History is history, less “developed” and thus wholly or partially primitive, medieval, anti-modern and most importantly irrelevant to the new and modern, to the “true” expression of “progress.” 50 Beginning with Vico and Nietzsche and ending more recently with Hayden White, this conception has been challenged to the core, for especially with the latter, historiography and the modern historical imagination have been shown to be deeply implicated not only in nationalism and modern state domination, but also in imperialism and colonialism; that is, in the mechanics of destructive power.51 History, to play on one of White’s famous terms,  plots  violence. By contrast, in its circulatory model – the form that prevailed in pre-modern Islam, China and India – history possessed, as Nietzsche vehemently argued in another context, a moral and ethical backbone.52 Instead of being instruments of building destructive political and national identities, it contained narratives of ethical instruction (precisely the central themes of classical Islamic history, which stood at no remove from Shar‘ !   !   discourse. Once we recognize that our modern historiography is plotted in no less mythical and imaginary ways than any other (a thesis argued forcibly and convincingly by White, his followers, and many others53), we will be on our way to articulating a more healthy conception of 49

 Walter Mingolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Durham, Duke University Press, 2011): 30.  These modernist religious convictions (like all convictions of traditional religion) also entail the derivative dogma that no modern form can be inferior to its pre-modern predecessor(s) or analogue(s). Thus, a claim to the effect that, say, the Islamic pre-modern conception of the rule of law is as robust as, if not more robust than, the Euro-American model is dismissed out of hand, without evidence whatever, as preposterous or mythical. What is not seen as preposterous is the power that this dogma exercises over modernist minds, one that is self-justifying and entirely resting on unfounded supremacist ideology. 51  See the instructive debate between A. Dirk Moses and Hayden White in History and Theory , 44, 3 (Oct. 2005): 311-332 (Moses); 333-38 (White); and 339-47 (Moses). 52  F. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 59-123. I am perfectly aware that Nietzsche may have changed his mind about the concept of history he outlines in this essay, but the magisterial vision and philosophical tour de force  of this discursive fragment is not altered in the least just because its author changed his view, if he indeed did. For Nietzsche’s change of mind, see Thomas H. Brobjer, “The Late Nietzsche’s Fundamental Critique of Historical Scholarship,” in M. Dries, ed., Nietzsche on Time and History (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): 51-60. Curiously, in the concluding paragraph (p. 59), Brobjer concedes on behalf of Nietzsche the very grounds on which the latter is alleged to have “abandoned” his essay. An insightful analysis of Nietzsche’s concept of monumental history and its relevance ( contra Brobjer) to his later philosophy may be found in Scott Jenkins, “Nietzsche’s Use of Monumental History,”  Journal of Nietzsche Studies , 45, 2 (Summer 2014): 169-81. 53  See n. 50, above, but also the case that Dipesh Chakrabarty makes against Natalie Zemon Davis with regard to “magical” historiographical proofs, in his “The Politics and Possibility of Historical Knowledge: Continuing the Conversation,” Postcolonial Studies, 14, 2 (2011): 243-50, at 247-50. Unfortunately, Chakrabarty’s defense of his position against Davis remains defensive, poignantly pointing to the fact that history’s “success as a hegemonic knowledge-form… depends on the destruction of the society that made some humans history-poor to begin with” (p. 249). Chakrabarty does not go the philosophical path to argue that the inescapable metaphysics that modern historiography cannot but assume (knowingly or not) as constitutive of its own foundations is no less mythical precisely because it rests on a particular conception of metaphysics, not least of which is the linear, singular, progress-based dogmas. 50

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the value of human life not only as embedded in a complex environment that sustains us, but that also instructs us in our “study” of the Other. The academic study of the Shar ! ‘a ‘a is just an instance in this overall picture, albeit one that commands a special sense of urgency.

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